As U of T makes a major push to establish itself as a leading player in the AI arms race, three of its highest-fliers in the field have been dramatically ousted from their roles at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI.

Current U of T computer science professor Jimmy Ba and his former student Tony Wu, both co-founders of xAI, announced their departures from the company last month. Their responsibilities were reportedly shifted to another U of T alum and co-founder, Guodong Zhang, who subsequently announced his own exit on March 13. 

Ahead of a high-stakes initial public offering in June, Musk has reportedly blamed the U of T trio, among other senior engineers, for the lacklustre performance of Grok, xAI’s flagship large language model. In a Thursday post on X, Musk wrote that the company “was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.”

On March 13, the Financial Times reported that Zhang left after being “blamed for the issues with the coding product and relieved of his primary duties by Musk.”

U of T, which has frequently highlighted Ba’s high-profile work at xAI, may be watching the trio’s next moves closely as it pushes to position itself as a global leader on AI and cultivate lucrative ties with American tech giants.

Grok and roll

Ba, formerly an AI research fellow at Meta, and often described as one of the most prominent members of the xAI team, was one of the first people tapped by Musk to join the project in 2023. 

Ba was hired as an assistant professor in U of T’s Department of Computer Science in 2018, and appears to have actively taught classes until at least 2022, according to publicly available student reviews. On ratemyprofessor.com, he has an average rating of 2.3 out of five stars. He has continued to supervise graduate students throughout his tenure at xAI, according to his personal website.

Wu and Zhang, who received their PhDs from U of T in 2023, had both worked briefly at Microsoft and OpenAI before joining xAI’s 12-person co-founding team.

According to Business Insider, Ba had overseen a “large portion” of xAI, reporting directly to Musk. He was head of research, safety, and enterprise over the summer of 2025, when Grok broke headlines for praising Hitler and making violent, sexual threats. This came after Musk implemented a system update intended to make the chatbot more “politically incorrect.”

Most of Ba’s responsibilities, including the safety portfolio, had already been transferred to Wu and Zhang by the new year, Business Insider reports. At this time, a since-restricted Grok feature allowed users to generate nonconsensual sexualized images of real people, including children, which prompted ongoing criminal investigations from authorities around the world.

Defy gravity

U of T has repeatedly spotlighted the work of Ba and other high-profile researchers, as it races to take advantage of the funding and partnership opportunities opened up by the AI boom. 

In a November 2025 public relations release, U of T shared that it had “received 141 media hits” when news first broke of the partnership between Ba and Musk. Later that month, Simcoe Hall secured $42.5 million from the federal government to fund AI computing infrastructure.

Over the summer, U of T promoted a magazine profile on Ba, in which he was described as “A former student of Geoffrey Hinton bringing Elon Musk’s Grok to the masses.” 

Hinton, a Nobel laureate and U of T professor emeritus, spent 10 years on the research team for Google’s AI model Gemini before leaving to speak freely about the dangers of AI. Simcoe Hall recently accepted a $10 million donation from Google, matched with $10 million of its own, to establish the “Hinton Chair in Artificial Intelligence.”

That came a week before December 9, when Google announced that it was partnering with the US Department of War to create GenAI.mil, an AI platform for the US military. According to The Intercept, recently leaked documents indicate that the Pentagon’s planned uses for its “AI arsenal” include bot campaigns designed to “influence foreign target audiences” and “suppress dissenting arguments.” 

On March 2, U of T president Melanie Woodin flew to Mumbai and, standing alongside Prime Minister Mark Carney in a meeting with Indian officials held at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, announced the launch of a new “AI centre of excellence” in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science. Two days later, U of T announced a major new AI research funding commitment from AMD, an American semiconductor company. 

Neither Musk nor Ba responded to The Varsity for a request for comment. xAI sent an automated response, “Legacy Media Lies.”